Artist Paul Klee, 1879-1940
Paul Klee was born in Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland in 1879 into a musical family. His Swiss mother was an singer and his German father was a music teacher.
Paul was interested in music and started to follow in his parents footsteps. By the age of seven he was playing the violin, and thought he would become a musician. But when he was eight years old , his grandmother gave him a box of sidewalk chalk and he feel in love with art. His parents continued to encourage the development of his musical skills, however, in his teen years he decided to focus on becoming an artist.
In 1898, with his parent’s reluctant permission, Klee began studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He showed talent in drawing, though struggled to develop a sense for color and felt that he might never learn to paint.
Influenced by Cubism and interested in both children’s and primitive art, he created small, jewel-like paintings in a personal language. His basic themes are nature and the man-made world of buildings and machines, and his works, although simple in appearance, are complicated in their inner meaning.
His works often have a fragile child-like quality to them and are usually on a small scale. Klee often used geometric forms as well as letters, numbers, and arrows, and combined them with figures of animals and people. Some works were completely abstract.
Klee worked in many different media – oil paint, watercolor, ink, pastel, etching, and others. He often combined them into one work. He used canvas, burlap, muslin, linen, gauze, cardboard, metal foils, fabric, wallpaper, and newsprint.
He produced almost 9,000 works of art in a variety of media throughout his life. He is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Paul Klee executed the cubism technique in his patented style Castle and Sun
– 1928 painting of Castle and Sun
– Three houses and a Bridge
